Self-service terminals (SSTs) are public access devices that provide goods and/or services to customers in an unattended environment and/or in an unassisted manner. To operate effectively in an unassisted manner, it is essential for an SST to be able to recover from any faults that arise without requiring any action to be taken by the customers of that SST, and without displaying any error messages to the customers.
Most, if not all, SSTs use a graphical user interface (GUI). Many SSTs rely on a conventional operating system to support the GUI. A common operating system used by SSTs is one of the Microsoft (trade mark) Windows (trade mark) suite of operating systems (such as XP (trade mark) or NT (trade mark)). These operating systems are available from Microsoft Corporation.
One problem that can arise with Windows operating systems is that when an error occurs, the operating system presents a new window pane overlying the current window pane to describe the error. This new window pane is typically smaller than the current window pane, and is typically referred to as a dialog box (or a pop-up box).
For personal computers, the appearance of a pop-up box is not problematic because the user typically clicks an “OK” or “Cancel” button on the pop-up box to dismiss the pop-up box. However, in an unattended environment, there is no-one who can click on the pop-up box. Even if a customer is present, there may be no mouse or other pointing device to enable the customer to click on the pop-up box.
It would be advantageous to be able to ensure that pop-up boxes are not presented to customers in a self-service environment.
At present, operating system registry settings are used to prevent pop-up boxes, but these are only effective against some types of errors.
Some self-service applications (that is, software on the SST that provides transactions to a customer) use structured exception handling to ensure that pop-up boxes are suppressed. However, some programming languages, such as Visual Basic 6 (VB6), do not support structured exception handling. This means that if software components that use structured exception handling, such as some dynamic linked libraries (DLLs), initiate an exception then the operating system may present a pop-up box in response to this exception.